Lloyd's Log: Nov 88

I suppose they still exist somewhere but surely not in the mode that I remember. Indeed you never hear people even speak of lodgings any more - far too bald and unvarnished a term for nowadays. If they were to get a mention they would probably be called, say, a transient domicilliary environment, presided over by a land person or something equally neuter. Proper lodgings, anyway, require not only the utilitarian terminology of ancient times like the 1950s but the furnishings, fashions and, most importantly, the attitudes of mind of the era.

Real lodgers, for example, would have their hair shorn high above their ears and at the back of the neck, well north of the collar of a fifty shilling suit, usually with a shiny seat. This was not entirely due to poverty, although that was usually present, more to the amount of polish that was applied to all visible surfaces. Lodgings were invariably old, chilly and decorated in the style of a police barracks but they were swept and scoured and buffed as if to remove all traces of a fatal epidemic. This ferocious level of cleanliness was tied in with the moral code of such establishments which, although fractured with great regularity on the quiet, was adhered to rigidly in public.

I encountered lodgings when I first came to London, my belongings wrapped in a spotted kerchief carried over my shoulder on the end of a stick. It was fully understood in those days that a man, a bachelor especially, would decline very quickly without a daily cooked breakfast and a substantial meal in the evening prepared and proffered by somebody else. Of the female gender of course.

It's puzzling now, though it wasn't at the time when I knew no better either. I had just left the Army where you had to learn to sew, iron, burnish, dust, sweep, make beds and leave the ablutions in far better condition than you would ever expect to find them. The Army was meant to make a man of you but turned you out much better equipped to get a job as a chambermaid.

You had discovered, though, that it was possible to live entirely on corned beef for astonishing periods, rather as a camel copes on a drink of water, and to sleep soundly anywhere that there was room to tilt your head. Above all you learned self-reliance which meant, in this context, that you didn't look to anybody else for any sort of assistance or sustenance unless you'd just been shot.

Why then was it not possible on returning to civilian life to fix up a satchel of iron rations and doss down in the park while finding one's feet? I don't know, but it wasn't. Nobody allowed it. A mother who had mopped her eyes, but squared her shoulders, as a troopship set sail carrying her son to certain death fighting the Fuzzy Wuzzys, or similar, became hysterical at the thought of the same lad settling in London in anything but much the same circumstances as he had enjoyed at home, aged six.

To meet this need there emerged a type of environment and a race of women who would act in loco parentis or, in my experience, in loco almost anything else, from wardress through to mistress. What a breed they were! In nearly every case cruel fate had forced them into a course of action as desperate as taking in lodgers, as the gruesome phrase of the period described their plight. If they had been blokes they would have joined the Foreign Legion.

My first landlady was Mrs Graunch, not her real name of course which was much more forbidding, as was the lady herself with her needle nose and eyes set like angry currants closely on either side of

the bridge. If she had joined the Legion they would have made her up to sergeant immediately, without the five year probationary period.

Mean as muck, her parsimony extended from food through the electricity and water supplies even unto the toilet paper. Needing the type of control of her domain now exercised only by certain South American dictators, she would allow no imports in any of these categories and was ruthless in her hunt for contraband. In my room, the only privacy was a single small drawer with a key to it but that didn't keep her out. She would pick the lock, with her nose I think, in search of rolls, either cheese or toilet.

Eating was always a crucial component of life in lodgings. What distinguished them, if anything did, was the status of the lodger as an auxiliary, or supernumerary, member of a proper household, rather than some fly-by-night using an assumed name. It was important that a lodger should be seen with his feet beneath the table as firmly as once they might have been anchored in the stocks.

This led to some dramas, I can tell you. In my next place the landlady had been widowed formally, unlike Mrs Graunch who, I believe, had done her husband in. Here the man had merely caught a bus, but in the small of the back unfortunately, leaving debts and a child to be raised, a familiar set of circumstances in the lodging business. I've noticed that an unusual number of landladies' daughters have been spurred on by hardship to become singers, actresses, ballerinas and the like. The only chance in show business for this daughter lay in her powerful resemblance to Arthur Scargil1.

Taken together with a vicious temper it was no wonder that her mother wished to marry her off, not least to leave her room free for another lodger. "Where are we off to tonight then, Mr Sandiman?" I can still hear her croon over the cornflakes. "Town Hall dance I think, Mrs Booby" (honorifics flew back and forth in lodgings like the ball in a ping-pong match). Mrs Booby would roll her eyes towards her daughter and produce a steam of vowels like those bubbles you can blow via a magical compound and a little hoop: "Oooooh, the Town Hall dance, Shirl!" she would carol as if Shirl and I had been planning the outing for weeks, but Shirl would merely growl and roll her lips back from her teeth like an angry cheetah.

As it happens a cheerful young salesman joined us, a single lodger being as rare as an only child in those days, and he took to her so quickly that he pressed my foot by mistake under the table on the very first evening. When Shirl produced a brilliant smile and took off her horn-rims I knew it was time to move on and fetched up in a house where the landlady had no less than six husbands while I was there, but all of them other people's, and nibbled at her lodgers in between times as if they were snacks.

Lodgings became an endangered and then an extinct species as this type of warm interaction fell foul of a century now hell-bent on high technology and solitary supremacy. Launderettes took care of the washing and made life possible with a single pair of sheets. The terror of starvation faded in the face of the fast food joints but so, of course, did the great eating rituals. Mums stopped worrying except about whether they could get back to work on the same day as giving birth. The scene was set for the bed-sitter, the flat, even the house. I have two now but rarely as much fun as I did in those of Mrs Graunch, Mrs Booby and the rest.